I recently installed OBSD on my laptop, and I'd like to bring it around the house to use it whenever.

The router has WPA2 for wireless security enabled, because I'm mainly concerned about other people connecting to it or maybe even sniffing packets of the information I'm exchanging with the internet wirelessly.

I checked the wireless support section of the Networking documentation on the OBSD website, and I think it said WPA was not supported for ath(4) type wireless cards. (I have a Linksys WPC55AG PCMCIA card.) But I tried to Google some information, and recent posts from 2008 were saying that WPA encryption was functioning on Atheros chip based cards.

I'm not sure how to go about this, but first I'd like to confirm whether or not I can use my wireless card as of now.

Will it make a difference if my modem and router are one and the same? When my ISP came here to set up internet, they put this giant box in the room (it's bigger than a school binder), which is the modem and also the router, and they told me it was not possible to disable the router even if I wanted to because it was part of the modem or something.

So I'm just wondering if this will make a difference in setting up authpf if I set up another computer for all traffic to be authenticated before using the internet.

In my case, my WiFi Access Point is a device connected to my OpenBSD router. If I understand what you've written, your WiFi access point is your ISP's router, and the only OpenBSD platform is your laptop? If so, then the only encryption available to you directly is WEP. If you have a second OpenBSD platform, it could be used to route encrypted traffic.

My environment:

Code:

WiFi AP
|
{internet} -- [OpenBSD] -- {wired LAN}

A possible configuration you might be able to employ, if you have two OpenBSD systems. In this case, you can't use authpf; WEP would have to be used to control access; but improved encryption could be had by tunnelling via SSH:

Code:

{internet} -- [ISP's WiFi AP] -- {wired LAN} -- {2nd OpenBSD box}

You'd set up an SSH session between your laptop and the 2nd box, and use SSH's SOCKS proxy to provide more robust encryption.

And then of course my laptop which is not connected (yet).
The [c]'s are different computers. I can install OpenBSD on any of them.
The Modem has a router built into it, and it's not possible to disable it. There is an antenna sticking out of the modem which is the wireless access point. Everything is inside a single box.

My research done on WEP made me conclude to believe that it's very easily cracked, which is why I chose WPA2 on the modem/router settings and set my own passkey.

Is it sufficient to protect your network from the bored 13 year old next door? No.

WEP is breakable with simple software. The last time I checked, about 5 years ago, it would take about 15 minutes of sniffing to have enough data to crack 40-bit WEP, and on the order of a couple of hours for 128-bit WEP.

If there is a possibility of a nearby bored teenager, I recommend turning off the Access Point in your router, then have one of your wired platforms run OpenBSD, and insert an OpenBSD-supported access point via USB or PCI, or an ethernet-connected AP via a 2nd NIC. Have this OpenBSD platform be your WiFi router, inside your wired network. e.g.:

Other options require trusting in WPA, and, either obtaining a WPA-compliant WiFi NIC for your laptop, or, using your existing ath(4) NIC with a different OS in the laptop that has a WPA-capable driver.

Supported hardware can be found for your architecture starting at www.openbsd.org/plat.html -- but to discover which drivers allow "Host AP" mode, you'll have to click on each individual driver and read through the man page.

An ethernet connected Acess Point is known as a "Wireless Ethernet Bridge" and there are several makes and models, which you can find with a little bit of Google Fu. As far as the wire-connected host is concerned, WiFi connected devices are just MAC and IP addresses reached by a standard Ethernet NIC.

I have a Linksys WRT54G router I had before from my previous internet connection before I switched to my current one, and it's being unused since I have the built-in router. Can I make use of the Linksys router?

A very small amount of Google Fu will show that there is 3rd party firmware which can convert that device into an ethernet bridge. I don't have one, and have not read through any of the links to see what the limitations and capabilities are. I do not even know if you can reverse the process, in order to return it to a working router.

You're certainly welcome to conduct your own research, and make your own tests.